October 9, 2012

That's a pretty disastrous six-point net swing in just a week, and the first time we've ever had Romney in the lead. It is inline [sic] with all other national polling showing Romney making gains in the wake of his debate performance last week....

Among women, Obama went from a 15-point lead to a slimmer 51-45 edge. Meanwhile, Romney went from winning independents 44-41 to winning them 48-42. And just like the Ipsos poll showed last week, Romney further consolidated his base. They went from supporting him 85-13 last week, to 87-11 this week while Obama lost some Democrats, going from 88-9 last week, to 87-11 this week....

... Obama's debate performance was an epic blunder. Romney gave his partisans a reason to get excited about him and they've responded. It should come as no surprise that people like to fight for people who are fighting for them.

That last sentence hints of anger that might be paraphrased as: We gave you a billion dollars and you didn't even bother to engage for 90 minutes.

What's one billion divided by 90? Obama threw away his supporters' money at the rate of over $11 million a minute. (And he wants to be in charge of spending all our money and much, much more for the next 4 years. Do the math!)

Let's face it, people: using polls to portray Obama as a runaway winner didn't work. Now we must use polls to portray Romney as a winner. Not a runaway; let's start with a small lead-- just enough to scare everyone.

"What's one billion divided by 90? Obama threw away his supporters' money at the rate of over $11 million a minute. (And he wants to be in charge of spending all our money and much, much more for the next 4 years. Do the math!)"

I can't recall all the debacles, so I'm sure this list is much longer.

So yes, if one "did the math," Althouse and voters like her would have decided months, if not a year or two before, to vote against Obama.

Instead, we have this little drama about Obama voters who can't make up their minds, watching the campaign for clues, when the last four years is all anyone would ever need to see what a clear failure our president is.

--Romney gave his partisans a reason to get excited about him and they've responded--

I don't agree with this. I think 1 of the reasons the viewership was high was because people wanted to see for themselves if it was OK to vote for Mitt. They might keep it to themselves and play dumb, but I think voters were looking for a reason.

And then Barry decided to be Barry, the MSM filter was removed for both men.

How do you reinflate a popped balloon? Well, you can patch it. But then you have a patched balloon, not the bright shiny unmarred balloon the folks bought the first time around. Or you can say, "What patch?" and pray real hard to Alinsky that the suckers will buy it, the lie and the balloon a second time around.

I don't agree with this. I think 1 of the reasons the viewership was high was because people wanted to see for themselves if it was OK to vote for Mitt.

I agree. My parents tell me about the voting booth in 1980. They just couldn't cast a ballot for Carter even though they did in 1976. There wasn't Dick Nixon to kick around anymore, nor his veeps. Reagan was a new candidate.

I think this year will be very similar. Voters just know the troubles with Obama and won't give him another 4 years to try again.

"And he wants to be in charge of spending all our money and much, much more for the next 4 years. Do the math!"And he did a remarkable job doing that in the last four years. He dug the car from the ditch and drove it to the cliff. Final destination: off the cliff.

"I agree. My parents tell me about the voting booth in 1980. They just couldn't cast a ballot for Carter even though they did in 1976. There wasn't Dick Nixon to kick around anymore, nor his veeps. Reagan was a new candidate."

My parents were much the same way. Carter supporters at the beginning but after four years of horror they had no problem voting for Reagan. Being from the South, part of their reasoning for voting for Carter was we needed to get a Southerner in there for a change, but he turned out to be a miserable failure and they had no problem saying, "Well, we tried."

I, too, see the same thing happening here. Many wanted to believe this guy was different for any number or reasons - youth, race, coolness, whatever - but now they see he's a miserable failure and they just aren't going to give it a second try.

Did anyone else notice all of the references by Obama to "the math"? I think it was at least 3, and that was echoed by his surrogates after the debate.

Why? Because when Ryan was picked as the VP candidate, the theme was that it was what Obama feared most: math. And for about a month, conservatives hammered liberals on how the math never works out for liberal policies.

Maybe a bit more cynical than most here today, but the polls seem to have been all over this year, and it was really time that the pollsters took their Dem bias out of their poll results, so that they could approach reality by election time. Hard to believe that one debate would do all this.

And, for all the libs out there, keep in mind that it ain't over till the fat woman sings, and the Pres has a huge stack of money to spend, with more coming in every day. Yes, a lot of it is probably illegal, but with Holder running the DoJ, who cares?

The hope of the MSM/liberal establishment is to offer up and cement the Comeback Kid characterization for Obama after the next two debates with that being the push to get the polls turned around and the election victory snatched from defeat.

I realize that's a stretch and relies on being able to create a narrative which is unsupported by facts, but this isn't 2008.

First, the bandwagon effect affects fundraising. Once you move outside the partisan core, people like to back winners. This is especially true of the business community. By assiduously cultivating its front-runner status, the Obama campaign has aided its ability to press future arguments.

Second, maintaining a lead allows greater leeway in the arguments it can make. Something like the “cancer ad” from August looks hard-hitting from a campaign that is leading (and I certainly include candidate super PACs as part of the “campaign”), but would probably be described as “desperate” from one that is losing.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it affects press portrayals of the candidates and party enthusiasm. This is the most important thing here: I still think the default expectation here has been that Obama should be losing.

Let's keep in mind Romney is likely to underperform expectations in the polls after the next big event, presumably the next debate. We're going to have a slight counter-trend to the continuing major trend.

Whenever an enthusiasm building event occurs some of the increase is short term. Some people are overly influenced by the immediate, in other cases people are more likely to answer polls rather than consider them a waste of time - consider various commenters at Althouse.

The overall trend is to Romney. He's doing what he needs to, which is demonstrate to non-political voters getting their first direct understanding of him that the Democrats' and Media's (but I repreat myself) caricature of him is false. Other than not step on himself in the debates, this is all he has to do against an incumbent with Obama's pathetic record.

But in order to maintain the same level of movement he would have to crush Obama in the foreign policy debate even more than he did the last, because expectations are so much higher. This isn't likely, so Obama's support will continue to deteriorate but at a lesser rate. Combine this with the enthusiasm dissipation and the poll results will likely be disappointing if not understood in context.

Romney's slow but steady gains will continue right up to the election. He'll win any state in which he's tied right now - which is true of some key states.

I finally watched the debate this past weekend. I have to say, I don't see how Obama was so bad. He seems like he always does to me, but then again, I have never been a fan. What was it about his performance that was so different than any other public speaking engagement he has had? Even with his teleprompter, he is about the same as he was that night.

I thought Romney did well, but I believe his positions make more sense to begin with.

What was it, exactly, about Obama that caused his supporters to tear their shirts and put ashes on their heads? Why did the scales suddenly fall from their eyes?

creeley23 said "I think the polling models are broken and the pollsters are frantically trying to patch them in real-time. I also do not rule out some amount of partisanship."

I'd like to believe that your assessment is correct, but I don't anymore. Bruce Hayden alluded above to what's probably happening. Pollsters do their work for money, and they only get responses from about 9% of their samples, and they have a huge cell-phone problem, and who answers polls, anyway?

Pollsters sell products, and it's natural for them to make the products attractive to the buyers. But in the first week of October, pollsters have to claw back toward reality in order to shore up their chances of getting new business in the future. Otherwise the news folks won't bother to quote the polls.

Part of the dealio for the BS was algebra for business. And I thought oh good I'll finally learn how to know for certainty which car to rent. And sure enough that was the fist thing we learned, just like the bird questions, everyone thinks of the stupidest things first so they're covered first, the rest was mostly about calculating parabolas. Which to narrow down takes a bit of intuition! to get started.

So anyway I was going along with homework and it occurred to me that numbers were just symbols for ideas, like words. And mathematical symbols are words too, and further any symbol will do.

So change them and see if that's really true. This was hours before guests would arrive, so I'm cutting the whole homework thing close. I must finish and be done with it for the weekend.

So I changed them all to ordinary Egyptian hieroglyphics, but not the right ones. Number one was papyrus, two was a snake in the shape of a 2, five was a hand, three is a mountain shape with three peaks, equal is two squares the same size, and so forth so that all numbers and symbols were reassigned and the modern day problems worked out and the answers spelled out in the contrived symbols which figured just as well as the regular numbers and symbols and when checked, it worked! I head felt pressurized with new comprehension, all this shit is just symbols! That's all. Now guests arrived. I went running around telling everybody my new realization and showed them my paper and they're all, Dude, relax, your realization is incredibly obvious and stupid. Like I'm the last one on Earth to figure that out.

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus was upbeat Saturday and expressed confidence about the GOP chances of claiming the state in the November clection.

"I just saw a Democratic poll come out two minutes ago and said we were two points down in Wisconsin," Priebus said, referring to a Public Policy Polling survey that showed President Barack Obama leading GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney by 49% to 47%.

"I never thought Wisconsin was out of reach," Priebus said. "I always thought it was a close race. Obviously we wouldn’t spend millions of dollars here if we didn’t think it would be close. It will be a battleground all the way to the end. Paul Ryan on the ticket gives an edge."

Priebus also said the party's ground game in Wisconsin is superior to the Democratic operation.

From the poster's comment:In the video, the Marines exhibit obvious love and respect for President Bush. His visit was not an event that followed closely on the heels of 9/11. This video was taken after the worst days of the war and after the surge created major progress in the region. The president is visiting the troops in Anbar Province, the home of the infamous Falluja and Ar Ramadi killing grounds. This visit took place after the province had been pacified. In other words, the Marines showed their love of Mr. Bush even after the darkest days of the war.

The Lejune video, on the other hand, shows Obama entering with all the pomp and circumstance of a royal visit to the peasants. Hail to the Chief plays in the background; something that President Bush didnt allow during his military visits. Obama knows that keeping the Marines locked at the position of attention means that no comparison can ever be made to the loving reception President Bush regularly received from the troops. Obama knows how the Marines feel and will always treat them exactly like the rabble he sees.

This is the real truth of the video and why it is so popular. It warms the heart of Bush supporters to see President Bush receive the love, gratitude and respect of these warriors. It angers Obama supporters because they also see the love President Bush receives and they know their man will never see anything similar from the troops. They know that these warriors loved the last president and will never give similar respect to this one.

Just popping in for a quick visit. My town in SE Pennsylvania (the ninth largest in the Commonwealth) went hog wild for Obama in 2008. There were yard signs and bumper stickers everywhere . This year? Crickets. Obama may still pull it out, but no one is in my face telling me they plan to vote. There is no enthusiasm for him.

Rush is funny as hell today. Apparently there's a new Gallup poll out that indicates the post debate Romney bounce is subsiding. Rush's comment? "Sullivan, who's been suicidal lately, can come in off the ledge."

Speaking of enthusiasm, here in St. Louis I was noticing none of it until a couple weeks before the Republican convention. We're a very blue city in a usually red state. In 2008 there were Obama stickers and signs everywhere. This time, not so much. Then, just before the R convention, they started sprouting up. Not quite at the level of 2008 but still lots of people getting 'out & proud' in a genuinely surprising way. Not just 'I'll vote for O because he's better than the alternative' but hardcore advocacy and defense and some real Romney Derangement Syndrome (not at the level of Bush or Palin, but still).

R's have always been more subdued here and we're not into yard signs so much and we don't want our cars keyed so you can't really gauge the level of enthusiasm. I'm sure it's there and simmering nicely, I just don't know if it's enough to overcome the strong Left presence here.

If there really is a resentment on the part of those who have donated to the "O" campaign, federal law, written by the Dems, provides a way out in cases where a credit card was used.

Disputing the charge on a credit card is very simple. The small print on the back of the monthly statement related to the credit card explains exactly how to do the dispute - and as long the complaint is received within 90 days of the original transaction, the charge will be reversed. The Obama campaign will be invited to send proof of your intent to donate, but in today's world, they will have no proof of signature.

Now guests arrived. I went running around telling everybody my new realization and showed them my paper and they're all, Dude, relax, your realization is incredibly obvious and stupid. Like I'm the last one on Earth to figure that out.

It's always hard to explain to people that something they take for granted is actually tricky and subtle.

When I was in grad school, we'd sometimes quote Douglas Adams and joke about being in the Institute for Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious.

The first debate wasn't about Obama winning or losing. It was about Romney showing that he was up to the job. The only way for Obama to have won would have been to get Romney to make himself look ridiculous, which was a high bar.

What's happening (and I still distrust the polls) is that people that want Obama gone but weren't certain about the potential replacement are now making up their minds. My wife was one of those, and will probably vote for Mittens now, despite her justified distrust of the Republicans in general. I remain firmly committed to Attila the Hun's reconstituted zombie corpse.

Romney made those folks believe that he can be a credible President. Obama's performance didn't matter one way or the other.

While Romney did give partisans a reason to get excited, I think the biggest effect was to make people accept Romney as a presidential, intelligent successful man who is full of reasonable ideas. On the other hand it made lukewarm Obama supporters think, geeze, this guy isn't trying very hard, why should I elect him?

Hey, listen. Write to the President. Let him know that he DID win. He WAS great, just the way he thought. He knows how to run a debate better than anyone, that's why some say he lost. Just jealous. Tell the President to stay the course. Lift up your voices: Mr. President, please, for the sake of the country, - DO IT AGAIN!!!